Constable: The Making of a National Painter

Abstract

John Constable is one of England's best-known landscape painters and greatest artists. While few will object to this statement, what it means will depend on when it is made. In the 150 years since his death in 1837, the terms of Constable's greatness have shifted several times. In the nineteenth century his scenes of the Stour Valley in Suffolk were valued as images of a particularly English countryside: the placid river with its locks and barges, great overhanging trees, and distant green water-meadows beneath massive cloudy skies. In this century, though the popular conviction of his Englishness persists, Constable is better known as Natural Painter.' As modernism rewrote the history of art, Constable was rediscovered as the man who excited Eugene Delacroix and other French artists in the 1820s: the natural painter whose freedom of technique, color, and chiaroscuro suggested a new way of representing the truth of landscape. The happy accident of his reception in France in the 1820s anchors English claims to participate in the development of an international style that moves through impressionism toward the more purely painterly and formal values of modernism. This Constable probably still dominates contemporary critical discussions of his work: the truthful student of nature who is also a painter's painter.2 There is more than a little chauvinism